1. Technical Field
The present invention relates in general to message handling in a distributed data processing system environment and in particular to filtering messages received from a message transmission backbone. Still more particularly, the present invention relates to a system, method and computer program product for dynamically optimizing the filtering of messages received from a message transmission backbone by a data processing system node.
2. Description of the Related Art
The advent of distributed data processing systems, which typically consist of a series of processing nodes connected by a message transmission backbone, has facilitated the creation of a seemingly infinite variety of distributed processing environments. These environments range from general-purpose data processing systems, which leverage the flexibility of a distributed architecture to create ever-faster execution of complex computations, to specialized systems for the control of complex machines. In either case, the independent nodes communicate with one another by broadcasting messages from one node to its peers across a message transmission backbone, such as a messaging bus. Currently available message transmission backbones range from conventional metal-conductor implementations in general-purpose systems to fiber-optic implementations in advanced vehicular systems and wireless implementations in communications systems.
One problem in optimizing the use of system resources in distributed data processing systems relates to the sheer volume of inter-nodal message traffic. In current technological implementations, nodes connected to the message transmission backbone process a tremendous number of messages, many of which prove to be irrelevant to the functions of the receiving node. The present invention recognizes that, to conserve nodal processing resources and/or to reduce nodal computational requirements, a system for configurably filtering messages received by a data processing system node from a message transmission backbone is needed.